Roberts at the Bat

I will decide every case based on the record, according to the rule of law, without fear or favor, to the best of my ability. And I will remember that it’s my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.

These last two weeks everybody has been talking about the Supreme Court

Chief Justice Roberts wrote the plurality’s opinion; his reasoning revolves around protecting the right of citizens to give the maximum $5200 per election cycle to as many candidates as they choose. But of course, the only citizens whose rights are actually affected are those who would like to give more than $123,200 to candidates, parties, and PACs during the 2013-2014 election cycle. According to the Federal Election Commission, only 646 people reached the limit during the 2011-2012 cycle. It goes without saying that these are 646 very wealthy people. So if you read Roberts’ opinion, I recommend doing a global-search-and-replace on the text to replace “citizens” with “very wealthy citizens”. For example:

The Government has a strong interest, no less critical to our democratic system, in combatting corruption and its appearance. We have, however, held that this interest must be limited to a specific kind of corruption — quid pro quo corruption — in order to ensure that the Government’s efforts do not have the effect of restricting the First Amendment right of very wealthy citizens to choose who shall govern them.

That success allowed Kathleen Sebelius to resign with a rosy glow rather than slinking out of town defeated. Her replacement has already been named, but you can expect the confirmation hearings to be a circus, as Ted Cruz is looking on this as yet another chance to repeal ObamaCare. I think Democrats should sell popcorn for this circus, because it’s going to be a public orgy of mean-spiritedness that will not do the Republican Party any good. One of the reasons I haven’t been panicking about the projections for the fall elections is that the whole Republican strategy revolves around exploiting the failure of ObamaCare. What if we get to November it’s obviously not failing?

In fact, what if Democrats hit back hard? I suggest something like: “According to independent research, Republicans’ refusal to expand Medicaid has killed X Floridians this year.” They’ll squeal like stuck pigs, but I like the conversation where they’re saying “No, we’re not killing people.” (Yes, they are killing people.)

Republicans are of course hanging on to the trainwreck narrative. But it’s worth pointing out that the point where the whole program explodes keeps receding into the future. Every prediction they’ve made that is checkable hasn’t panned out.

and equal pay

Last Tuesday was Equal Pay Day, the theoretical point where working women have finally made as much money as men did in 2013, given an average wage 77% of a man’s wage.

There’s been a lot of discussion of that number these last two weeks, with conservatives arguing that it’s meaningless, because women do different jobs, have different qualifications, choose a different career path, and so on.

I tried to understand the statistics myself a couple years ago, and my overall conclusion was that you can shrink the gap by normalizing for various factors, but you can’t make it go away. Discrimination continues to be a real, measurable thing. That’s more-or-less the conclusion ThinkProgress comes to also. It’s also not clear that you should normalize for everything you can possible normalize. Yes, women congregate in poorer-paying professions and interrupt their career paths to have children. But some of that is just discrimination of a different sort: “Women’s work” pays less (at least in part) because it has traditionally been women’s work, not because it’s inherently less valuable. And we could set up the economy in such a way that interrupted career paths wouldn’t be punished as much as they are, but we don’t.

The Republican position on this is that of course they are for equal pay for women, they’re just against any effort to help bring that about. Bill O’Reilly laid out the overall strategy

I strong believe in fighting for equality and I also believe that institutional bias should be against the law. What I oppose is government trying to impose equality.

To which Stephen Colbert responded:

I agree with every single word you’re saying, even if those words don’t agree with each other. You see, I also believe that institutional bias should be against the law. And, at the same time, that government shouldn’t do anything about it.

and taxes are due tomorrow

Ezra Klein explains how the IRS could just send you a bill (which you could ignore and send them a 1040 instead if you wanted). For most people, it would be easier and cheaper than keeping records and sending the IRS a bunch of information it already has. But tax-preparation companies would lose out, and they have lobbyists. So it’s not going to happen.

and you also might be interested in …

How I spent my week off: I talked about “Acceptance and Action” at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois.

Here’s my best advice for picking easy-to-remember hard-to-guess passwords: Think of some line or quote or song lyric that you’ll never forget, and turn it into an acronym. Example: “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth” produces the password ItbGctH&tE. In your own mind, call it “the Genesis password” and if you put it on a list somewhere, just write down “Gen”. (Needless to say, I’m never using that one.)

If you don’t follow the conservative media, you miss all the exciting inside-the-bubble stories that the regular media doesn’t cover … because they’re not true. Example: Attorney General Eric Holder isn’t pushing for gun owners to wear tracking bracelets. Imagine that you hear four or five similarly outrageous stories each week, and that the oh-never-mind retractions don’t always reach you. Think what that would do to your worldview.

Comments

I’m sorry to say, your password method is no longer a very good one. While it used to be widely recommended, password cracking dictionaries are now extensive enough (and computers are now fast enough) that acronymized quotes are now surprisingly easy to crack. The trouble with easy-to-remember quotes and lyrics is that everyone else remembers them too, and password crackers put lots of them into their dictionaries.

The only safe password now? Something completely random. But that’s hard to remember, especially since you should use a different one for every website. So everyone should really use a password manager like LastPass or 1Password, which will generate and remember secure passwords for you. Then you only need to remember a single master password. This should also be completely random—but you can make it easier to remember by using random dictionary words rather than random letters. The “diceware” method is the recommended way to generate these. 5 or 6 truly random words are very, very easy to memorize, but effectively impossible for computers (currently) to crack.

The other point I would argue with is that it can’t hurt to change your passwords—in fact, if the website in question is still vulnerable to heartbleed, it can hurt, because you might just be handing over your new password to a hacker. http://mashable.com/2014/04/09/heartbleed-bug-websites-affected/ is maintaining a list of major sites and recommending whether you should change your password or not.

Sorry for the huge comment, but password security is more important than ever, and it’s a preoccupation of mine.